by Paul R. Spitzzeri
This latest entry in the “Through the Viewfinder” series presents the last of a quartet of photographs taken by Thomas Ward of sections of downtown Los Angeles on 15 August 1926. He mislabeled the location, inscribing on the reverse that it was the northwest corner of 7th and Hope streets, when it was actually a block to the west at the northwest corner at Flower.
As has been noted here before, there were was tremendous growth in construction throughout this area during the Roaring Twenties, with Homestead owner Walter P. Temple, for example, involved in a pair of syndicates that built commercial edifices on the east side of Spring Street on either side of 8th Street, not far to the east, while, in summer 1926, he was pursuing his last major individual business development project through the Temple Estate Company, the Edison Building in Alhambra, in the San Gabriel Valley.
Seventh Street, moreover, was rapidly becoming the premier shopping district in downtown Los Angeles with anything from large stores like Barker Brothers, which recently finished a new building directly south of the structures shown in our highlighted photo here, to smaller shops such as those in the edifice that is the main one in the image. At the right edge of the photo are stacks of construction material for the Sun Realty Company’s Roosevelt Building, which was completed in spring 1927, while at the upper left is another edifice in process, this being the dramatic Fine Arts Building, which was opened at the end of 1926.
Perhaps it was the work being done on the Fine Arts and Roosevelt that led Ward to snap this picture and he may have thought this modest three-story building with about 60 feet of frontage on 7th and close to double that on Flower was going to soon give way to height-limit (12 stories, apparently to not blot out the sun in downtown) structures, as well. Whatever the intent, this rather humble edifice does have some interesting history associated with it.
The site was owned by Philip Louis Wilson (1878-1970), who, with his two sisters, inherited some substantial property left by their mother, the remarkable Catherine O’Keefe Wilson, after she died at the end of 1905. A prior post here covered some of Mrs. Wilson’s life, from arriving to the Angel City with a sister at end of the 1850s and working as a household servant, to marrying Sweden native Peter Wilson, to completing, after his death, the construction of their Wilson Block in the 1880s and the management of her estate.
Philip Wilson, with this generous bequest, extended his business dealings significantly as Los Angeles expanded mightily in the early 20th century, including as a bank executive, oil company official and manager of a substantial real estate portfolio. This latter included projects such as the first Belasco Theatre, a Hellman Commercial Trust and Savings Bank building, the Seventh Street Public Market, the Equitable Building and much else. Wilson’s palatial house, just off Wilshire Boulevard, between Western and La Brea, has been occupied by former Governor Edmund (Pat) Brown and Law and Order producer Dick Wolf.
This corner of 7th and Flower had, by the early 1890s, some cottages on it, but, in August 1905, the 62 1/2 feet (on 7th) and 115 feet (on Flower) lot, was sold for $51,000 by Mrs. M.L. Ferguson to Abraham I. Cohen and Joseph L. Jonas. It was noted that “the purchase was made as an investment” and, within a short time, Cohen and Jonas listed the property, first for $62,500 (obviously placing a valuation on the 7th Street frontage), but the price jumped to $65,000, then $75,000 and eventually $125,000 and the realtor with the listing made sure to advise potential buyers that Seventh was sure to rival Broadway in importance as downtown expanded—this was very much prescient.
Wilson became the lot’s owner and the 14 May 1911 issue of the Los Angeles Times recorded that,
Will Hayward of South Dakota leases an hotel to be erected on the northwest corner of Seventh and Flower streets. This will be one of the finest additions to this street [which?]. The building will be of brick construction and will contain fifty rooms, with [a] large ground floor lobby and offices. The building will be steam-heated, with [a] separate plant for hot water . . .
The hotel became the Busch and operated through the late 1940s. Myron H. Wells of the lease department of the real estate firm of William W. Mines (Mines Field, the Los Angeles municipal airport, was named for him and is now Los Angeles International Airport) and Oscar E. Farish (a former member of the City Council) handled the arrangements, including a change in plans for the ground floor, which was built with seven stores, a quartet on 7th and a trio on Flower, which can be discerned in the image. In late November, Wells advertised seeking such businesses as a bakery, confectioner, drug store, meat marked, restaurant or tailor for these spaces.
Construction the edifice began in early September with architect John B. Nicholson, a native of England who practiced in Australia (and was known during his brief Los Angeles stay as a crack cricket player) and did work in Covina (that city’s Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church still stands) and Monrovia, making the announcement. Not being a skyscraper or an architectural showpiece, little was said about the edifice after that, so we’ll jump forward to the end of the Teens.
The 13 July 1919 edition of the Times briefly reported that a leasing department agent of W.W. Mines and Company leased, on behalf of Wilson, the structure, though, it seems almost certain that it was just one of the stores, the prime one at the corner with the address of 801 W. Seventh. This space, including an entrance on the Flower Street side, was previously a grocery store, and it was rented to William A. Steffen, said to have been “a former New York milliner.” Actually, Steffen (1885-1965), hailed from Indiana and spent much of his early life in Chicago, where he worked as a stenographer for a railroad company.
By 1912, Steffen was in Los Angeles and was employed with at least a few millinery (meaning, women’s hat makers and/or retailers) over the next several years. He was better known in his early years in the Angel City for his resonant tenor singing voice and, being Irish, was widely recognized as the “John McCormack of Los Angeles,” McCormack being a vocalist of international reputation. In 1914, he married Marie Earley, whom he knew in their hometown of Loganport, Indiana, and the couple had four sons and a daughter.
When Steffen registered for the draft on 12 September 1918 as World War One neared its end, he was a buyer and manager for Citrin’s, a women’s clothing store at the southeast corner of 7th and Grand Avenue. His decision to leave under a year later to start his own business a few blocks to the west was, no doubt, a significant one, given the competition he faced from well-established businesses.
Steffen, however, got a major promotional boost from the Times and its fashion section editor from 1921-1934, Peggy Hamilton (May Bedloe Armstrong, 1894-1984), who was also a designer and worked extensively for film actors and their dresses. Hamilton had enormous influence with women’s fashion during the Roaring Twenties and obviously saw that Steffen had originality and talent in his design of hats. On many occasions, between 1922 and 1927, his creations were featured in Hamilton’s Times fashion pages, sometimes with actors modeling the hats, though his wife Marie was more commonly fulfilling that role.
The 31 August 1924 number of the paper ran a feature on Steffen by Lannie Haynes Martin (1874-1938), a former editor of the well-known Angel City magazines, The Land of Sunshine and Out West, and who also had many essays, poems and short stories published in periodicals. She was a feature writer for the Los Angeles Examiner, as well as the Times and her piece on Steffen began with,
It is a long jump from railroading to millinery, but William A. Steffen, local milliner, made it most successfully. He even says he made the railroad a stepping stone to the millinery salon. As a small boy Willie Steffen designed all of the dresses for his sisters’ dolls and made the hats himself.
It was added that he had a habit of taking his siblings’ headwear, tearing them up and redesigning them, while also offering advice, sometimes accepted, to his mother and aunts about their choice of hats. His father, a pie salesman, however, was adamant that he would guide his son’s career choice, saying, “I’m going to give that boy of mine a man’s job,” so he worked for a large, unnamed railroad company, doing everything from working as a brakeman to auditing in the company office.
Steffens told Martin that a fall foray on the rails in the Cumberland Mountains in the east drew him back to “my old desire to work with colors and to create things from beautiful fabrics.” The autumn colors in that range were an inspiration and he imagined women’s hats with “brilliant red, orange and yellow plumage.” He added that “if a milliner would follow nature and, instead of showing so many black, dark brown and dingy-looking hats for fall, but would display those same brilliant colors in hats, [I] would make a success.” He continued,
I gave up my job, came to Los Angeles and started my first millinery venture. I had a color that year which I called “tangerine;” it is almost the same shade which is so fashionable this year and is known as “Love-apple red,” and it created a sensation . . .
In an old scrap book I had pasted some of those brilliant autumn leaves which I had gathered while running on the railroad, and shellaced [sic] them, so that they still retained their vivid coloring.
I took these leaf samples and some dyes and experimented . . . The hats went like hotcakes. I have always followed nature’s cue since . . . and so made railroading a stepping stone to a successful millinery salon.
He likened nature’s creation of a color atop a cactus to his view that “with the creation of an appropriate hat any woman can be made attractive,” but he ruefully observed there was one major problem in his work. He pronounced that “nature is an autocrat, but a milliner must give the woman her way! Some time I may get disgusted and go back to railroading.” While this did not happen, Steffen did close his business in the late Twenties and turned to operating a florist shop, though why this change was made is unknown. He continued in this line of work until at least the 1950s.
His neighbor to the west was another women’s fashion business owner, though of much less public recognition. Mathias Burger (1888-1973) hailed from Zadareni, Romania, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and close to the borders with Hungary and Serbia. He made his way, at age 18, to the Adriatic Sea at Croatia and took a ship to the United States, arriving on 22 April 1906. The earliest that could be located of Burger, who Anglicized his name to Matthew, in Los Angeles was from his World War I draft registration on 5 June 1917, in which the 29-year old stated that he was an unemployed furrier.
By October, however, Burger was running a business on Broadway north of 9th Street and then, the 30 November 1919 edition of the Times noted that the Mines firm, on behalf of Wilson, leased the space at 803 W. 7th, next to Steffen, to Burger. He appears to have kept his shop there for close to a decade before relocating to the Harvard Heights section of town on Western Avenue between Olympic and Pico boulevards and he was operating as late as 1940.
The furthest west storefront on the Seventh Street side of the building has a sign in the photo reading “West Seventh St. Coffee Shop,” though nothing was located about this enterprise. In the early Twenties, the National Building and Investment Company occupied the space, followed by C.C. Curnett’s realty office. By the end of the decade, the Martha Washington candy store was there and it was followed by the Atlas Typewriter Company.
At one point, Steffen’s old quarters were occupied by the Dan-Dee Factory Shoe Repair business and it was either this firm or a shoe store that operated there through the 1940s. By about 1951, a Bank of America branch was in this section of the building and operated there for close to four decades, while, in more recent years, a Florsheim shoe store was at that address, as well. Now 801 W. 7th is a Taco Bell Cantina, with other retail businesses on the Flower side including the Petra Grill and Petra Market and Smoke Shop.
What isn’t clear is whether the edifice there today, which has the same footprint as the building shown in the century-old photograph, is the same structure, perhaps heavily remodeled and converted from three stories into one, including a possible lowering of the roof. One can compare the photo to the linked Google Map view by looking at the bit of decorative detailing on the Fine Arts Building, directly to the west and which was under construction.
The 1926 image also shows, though with no identifying features, the several buildings along the west side of Flower up to 6th Street—Wilshire Boulevard was later extended through this block from Figueroa Street to the west. The large and distinctive structure was the Southland Hotel, now the site of an 18-story office tower. Another notable element to the photo is the large rooftop billboard on the Wilson structure with an electrifying advertisement for Packard automobiles, including its well-known catchphrase: “Ask the man who owns one!”
This is a great photograph showing a part of downtown Los Angeles in yet another transition with larger, height-limit commercial structures, like the Fine Arts, Roosevelt and Barker Brothers buildings, transforming the area, though this corner, unlike the others at the intersection of 7th and Flower, remains an outlier with its diminutive edifice, whether a heavily remodeled version or not.